Why haven't DVDs made my baby a genius?

Wednesday 28 October 2009 08:59 BST

If, like me, you belong to the demographic unfairly called "pushy parents", this has not been a good week.

The other morning I had just put young Master A down for his mid-morning "brain interlude" - making sure I remembered to switch on the Mandarin for Beginners CD that he seems to find so soothing - when I opened the paper to discover devastating news: the Walt Disney Corporation has agreed to give refunds to parents in North America who had bought DVDs from its Baby Einstein range.

Perhaps you are not aware of these products? If so I can only assume that you either don't have young children or have young children but for some reason don't care about getting them accepted by the Sorbonne in time to announce the fact at their fourth birthday party.

The refunds are being offered following suggestions that not only are these DVDs not, as previously claimed, educational, but, according to certain studies, they are positively detrimental to the development of the child.

Thousands like me are devastated. How could it be so? The DVDs always seemed so educational.

Take the first one made, for example, Baby Mozart. It says "Mozart" right there in the title, for goodness sake.

Everybody knows that listening to Mozart is good for the brain - we half-remember half-reading it in a paper somewhere.

It is completely reasonable, therefore, to assume that something associating itself with the name "Mozart" is bound to be educational.

You can hardly blame us for buying the thing and sticking our children in front of it for three hours while we wandered off to listen to the Today programme.

And what about the actual content of the DVD? Essentially, it is just over half an hour's worth of footage of toys going round and round to a soundtrack of classical music tinnily rendered on synthesizers (young babies can't hear orchestras very well, as they haven't yet properly developed any taste).

Now you tell me why that shouldn't have led me to believe that after a couple of viewings young Master A would leap out of his Mothercare recliner and go and fix the Large Hadron Collider.

Now this much I'm certain is rot. Master A knows several words that his less educated colleagues have yet to acquire, such as "pause", "repeat" and "Dolby Surround Sound".

To find out that the Baby Einstein DVDs are no good for our precious little things is a heavy blow for pushy parents like me.

Not least because now we might have no choice but to put the lapsang souchong down and read the little buggers a book ourselves.

A birthday on the bus

You know how you think community spirit is dead these days because you get funny looks everytime you try to start a singalong on the bus? Well, it's not. Turns out you've just been trying the wrong thing.

This week Emiloju Fatima Lawal went into labour on a bus to Hackney. And it didn't elicit annoyed tuts, as you might have imagined.

According to reports in this very paper "passengers came to her aid". So now you know what you have to do.

Anyway, mother and baby are doing well and, traffic permitting, they should get to the hospital stop in the next couple of days.

Karadzic could face a £10 fine

But even my bleeding-heart liberality has gone a bit scabbed over at the sight of Serbian war criminals running rings round justice.

Former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic refusing to turn up to his own trial is simply absurd.

It's one thing to ignore a parking fine, but the man is charged with genocide. It's like he didn't turn up because Steve in the pub told him: "Yeah, ignore that, mate. They just send those summons out automatically. I'll have a rum and black."

And then there's Biljana Plasvic, his ex-partner in war crime, who walks free this week. She pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity and was given 11 years.

Eleven years? Hundreds of thousands of people were slaughtered in the ethnic cleansing she referred to as a "natural phenomenon".

She's served two-thirds of her sentence and been given time off for good behaviour. That must have been some really, really good behaviour.

Yes, she was complicit in the attempt to exterminate an entire people but that prison library has never been so well-organised. I expect that's a comfort to those left behind.

Motor-mouth

The skull of a gigantic pliosaur - a sea-bound contemporary of the dinosaurs - has been found on Dorset's Jurassic Coast.

Describing the scale of the thing, many reports said that its jaw was so wide it could have swallowed a car - as if "car" is a unit of measurement. What sort of car? A Smart car? Something you'd see a Fulham Jacinta picking the kids up in?

At any rate, this discovery gives us fresh clues as to why these giant creatures died out: starvation.

If you're geared to eating cars, you ought at least to wait until they've been invented before you evolve.